After Hours

The reason IBM stock is currently sliding and dragging down the broader Dow Jones future with it is that with Q2 revenues of $20.8 billion, the company not only missed expectations, but was a plunge of 13.4% from a year ago: a drop that surpasses the biggest revenue drop recorded during the peak of the financial crisis! This is also 13 consecutive quarter of declining Y/Y revenues.

The Fed stimulates absolutely nothing but the media’s descriptions of it and the various economists and their models that depend solely on them being successful in doing so.If recessions are emotional and irrational pessimism as the monetary textbooks believe, then QE and ZIRP are just right sort of “happy pills” to push emotions back to the “right” direction.Is it any wonder the economy is in danger of sinking toward catastrophic failure?

Following yesterday's early MNI rumor that a Chinese QE is being "considered" and which sent the Shanghai Composite surging 3% and led to an initial boost in US stock futures, overnight the PBOC scrambled to once again deny such speculation. Of course, going full "cold Turkey" on Chinese stimulus would be too much for the market to handle, so in a piece by the WSJ also released overnight, the author said the PBOC would pivot from outright QE to mere LTRO, which is also not new and was reported over a week ago here in "China Floats QE Trial Balloon, PBoC May Launch LTROs." In any event, for now at least, Asian stocks are not happy despite Apple's latest blockbuster results, and neither is Europe, with the Stoxx 600 down 1%, and even the E-mini is hugging 2100 unable to levitate on any imminent central bank intervention.

In America’s fraudulent oligarch economy in which corruption and theft have become the preferred means to earn money, it’s no surprise doctors feel a need to participate. “Mr. Rorie was recruiting homeless people, prosecutors said, ...after hours of unnecessary tests and fake diagnoses, the homeless people would be sent off with sneakers - selected from stacks of shoeboxes in the clinics’ basements... "We can use the same patients like guinea pigs for anything we want,” Mr. Vainer was recorded saying in a government wiretap." Do no harm indeed.

Herbalife stock is up over 5% after hours after WSJ reportsBill Ackman (among others) made false statement about Herbalife's business models to regulators - in order to spur investigations into the company and lower its stock price. This comes just months after Ackman kinda-sorta-didn't-really insider-trade in the Allergan 'scam' that we detailed here. We suspect Whitney Tilson (and his Lumber Liquidators positions) is getting a little nervous now... and Carl Icahn is quietly laughing to himself.